Let me cut to the chase. Newt Gingrich is a racist. I know that's not news to most folks here, particularly not to people of color. And I know that many will say, sure, he's a racist, but he's also a has-been, why waste any breath on him? To which I can only reply that the continued respect and deference accorded to him by most of the media and many Americans of prominence need to be countered. Every time the guy speaks now, his racism ought to be pointed out, called out and stomped on.
There was plenty of evidence for his racism during the presidential campaign. But his latest foray into the mire Tuesday with Greta Van Susteren on Foxaganda cast away any smidge of lingering doubt.
During the interview, Gingrich made a series of disparaging remarks about President Obama. He claimed he's not a "real president" and compared him to scab refs for the National Football League:
“He doesn’t do anything that presidents do, he doesn’t worry about any of the things the presidents do, but he has the White House, he has enormous power, and he’ll go down in history as the president, and I suspect that he’s pretty contemptuous of the rest of us.”
Another version of the he-isn't-really-one-of-us, foreigner trope combined with the lazy loafer trope. And then there was this:
“You have to wonder what he’s doing,” Gingrich continued. “I’m assuming that there’s some rhythm to Barack Obama that the rest of us don’t understand. Whether he needs large amounts of rest, whether he needs to go play basketball for a while or watch ESPN, I mean, I don’t quite know what his rhythm is, but this is a guy that is a brilliant performer as an orator, who may very well get reelected at the present date, and who, frankly, he happens to be a partial, part-time president.”
It's as if Gingrich were channeling the old days in Georgia—my birth-state and his adopted one—when slave-owners would sit on the verandah with their family sipping mint juleps and lemonade and talking about how lazy all the field-hands were.
But, hey, there is something refreshing when a prominent racist snatches off his own mask. All that's left is for Newt to publicly invoke the "N" word. The way he's going, that can't be far away.